ARC Raiders Best Settings — PC & Console Optimization Guide 2026

ARC Raiders best settings are not something you want to leave on autopilot — this PvPvE extraction shooter from Embark Studios is built on Unreal Engine 5, and while the former DICE developers have done exceptional optimization work by UE5 standards, the wrong graphics configuration can still cost you 30 to 50 frames per second and, more critically, your life in a firefight. Whether you are running a budget rig trying to hit 60fps at 1080p, a mid-range build chasing smooth 1440p raids, or a high-end machine pushing for 144fps competitive play, this guide covers the exact ARC Raiders settings that matter — and the ones that silently drain your performance without giving anything back.

Below you will find our three reference PC builds — from the budget RX 7600 XT tier all the way to the RTX 5080 high-end rig — alongside a full ARC Raiders settings table so you can match your hardware and jump straight to the right configuration. The Test Bench used for all PC testing is listed first for full transparency.

Why ARC Raiders Best Settings Matter — Engine & Performance Overview

ARC Raiders runs on Unreal Engine 5 but bucks the engine’s reputation for poor PC optimization — Embark Studios, staffed by veterans who shipped the Battlefield series at DICE, have produced one of the most competent UE5 PC ports to date. The game consistently delivers 150+ fps on high-end hardware and runs solidly on mid-range builds without the catastrophic UE5 hitching that plagued early Fortnite UEFN or The Finals. That said, the ARC Raiders performance profile has three clear pressure points: foliage rendering, shadow quality, and volumetric lighting effects. These settings interact with both the GPU and CPU simultaneously — in the game’s large open extraction zones where all three are under load at once, the wrong combination bleeds 30 to 50 frames from your target. ARC Raiders also inherits UE5’s shader compilation stutter on first launch, which improves significantly after the initial session as shaders populate the cache. Always run a warmup raid before benchmarking your ARC Raiders best settings configuration.

ARC Raiders System Requirements

Minimum Requirements — 1080p / 60fps / Low Settings

Embark’s official minimum spec from the Nexon support page targets Low graphics settings at 1080p and 60fps. The CPU floor is an Intel Core i5-6600K or AMD Ryzen R5 1600, paired with a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, Radeon RX 580, or Intel Arc A380, and 12GB of RAM. An NVMe SSD is required — ARC Raiders uses aggressive Nanite-based streaming and mechanical hard drives cause constant texture pop-in that is both visually disruptive and a competitive disadvantage. The game’s download footprint is a lean 27GB on disk, which is a direct result of Nanite’s procedural geometry rather than traditional high-poly mesh duplication.

Recommended Requirements — 1440p / 60fps / High Settings

The recommended spec targets High settings at 1440p and 60fps. You need an Intel Core i5-9600K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 on the CPU side, paired with a GeForce RTX 2070, Radeon RX 5700 XT, or Intel Arc B570, and 16GB of RAM. In practice, maintaining a consistent 60fps floor at 1440p High in the most demanding multi-faction encounters requires enabling DLSS or FSR upscaling alongside the recommended hardware. The RTX 2070 without upscaling will dip below 60fps during intense ARC machine encounters with heavy particle and volumetric loads — enable DLSS Balanced as a minimum when using this card at 1440p.

High-End & 4K Requirements

Embark does not publish a formal 4K specification. Based on our testing, the RTX 5070 with DLSS CNN Quality handles 1440p at 90–120fps comfortably at High settings. For native 4K at 60fps, you need RTX 5080 or Radeon RX 9070 XT class hardware. Ray-traced global illumination at 4K is RTX 5090 territory — anything below that should run Ray-Traced GI at Static (pre-baked) and save the full dynamic RT budget for titles where it is more visible. Storage stays at 27GB on SSD, with 50GB free space recommended to accommodate shader compilation files during the first boot session.

Best Graphics Settings in ARC Raiders Explained

ARC Raiders Best Display & Resolution Options

Set Window Mode to Borderless Fullscreen. It avoids the input handling quirks of Exclusive Fullscreen while matching its performance within 1–2fps — and it allows seamless Alt-Tab during raids without the occasional crash that Exclusive mode can trigger on UE5 titles. Keep native resolution and do not manually reduce render resolution in the display settings; the result is significantly blurrier than using the built-in upscalers, which have access to temporal accumulation data that raw resolution scaling does not. V-Sync must be Off — enabling it in ARC Raiders adds measurable input latency that directly affects your reaction time in PvP gunfights. Manage screen tearing at the driver level using G-Sync or FreeSync instead. Enable NVIDIA Reflex on NVIDIA GPUs or AMD Anti-Lag on AMD GPUs — both reduce the pipeline delay between mouse click and rendered frame, and in a shooter where headshots on moving targets require precise timing, that reduction is felt. Performance cost: Low.

ARC Raiders Shadow, Foliage & Volumetric Settings

Shadows is the second-largest GPU drain in ARC Raiders after foliage. Shadows Low is the correct choice for low-end and mid-range hardware — the perceptible difference versus Medium during active combat is minimal, and the performance return is 10–20fps in shadow-heavy outdoor zones. Foliage Quality carries an important competitive note backed by community benchmark data: at Medium and High foliage, enemy players crouching in undergrowth are partially obscured by denser vegetation rendering, while Low foliage clears much of that cover, giving players a direct visibility advantage in the game’s wooded extraction areas. This rendering disparity exists across all hardware tiers and has not been patched — Low Foliage is the competitive standard until Embark normalizes it. Volumetric lighting covers atmospheric fog and god rays in outdoor zones. Volumetrics Off recovers 7–10fps compared to Low with a minor atmosphere loss; Volumetrics Medium is the right call for high-end builds where visual presentation matters. Performance cost: High across all three settings.

ARC Raiders Post-Processing, Ambient Occlusion & Global Illumination

Post-Processing controls ambient occlusion quality alongside film grain, bloom, and depth of field. Keep it at Low or Medium — and note a confirmed visual bug specific to ARC Raiders: at Medium and High Post-Processing levels, the ambient occlusion rendering produces noisy, grainy shimmering around foliage, which worsens significantly when using FSR 3 or XeSS as your upscaler. DLSS CNN handles the AO noise better, but the cleanest fix at any upscaler is Post-Processing on Low, which disables ambient occlusion entirely. The image looks marginally flatter but the shimmer disappears completely. Disable Motion Blur and Depth of Field at every hardware tier — both obscure enemy clarity during fast movement and ADS with no gameplay return whatsoever. Performance cost: Medium.

ARC Raiders Upscaling — DLSS vs FSR 3 vs XeSS

ARC Raiders supports all three major upscaling solutions, and the choice between them matters more than in most games due to the ambient occlusion noise issue described above. DLSS CNN — the older convolutional neural network model — outperforms DLSS Transformer in ARC Raiders specifically. The Transformer model produces sharper static frames but introduces particle trails and volumetric fizzling in the game’s atmospheric outdoor zones. CNN is more stable, resolves AO noise more cleanly, and delivers better 1% low frametimes. Select DLSS, then choose CNN from the model selector, and set quality to Quality mode for 1080p and 1440p. FSR 3 Quality is the correct pick for RX 7600 XT and other AMD owners — it boosts output by 20–35% and pairs well with Post-Processing Low to suppress the AO flickering that FSR amplifies. XeSS delivers cleaner results than FSR 3 in ARC Raiders and is the best option for Intel Arc users. On Frame Generation: disable it for PvP content. Frame Generation inserts AI-interpolated frames between real rendered frames, which raises the displayed FPS counter while leaving actual input response latency tied to the lower base framerate. In a gunfight requiring precise tracking and a sub-100ms reaction window, that added latency matters. Frame Generation is only appropriate above 100fps base during PvE exploration where response latency is not critical. Performance cost: Upscaling reduces GPU load by 20–40% and is the single highest-impact ARC Raiders settings change available.

ARC Raiders Settings Guide — Best Config by Hardware Tier

Low-End PCs — Ryzen 5 7600 / RX 7600 XT Class

This ARC Raiders settings configuration targets a stable 60fps at 1080p. Set Shadows Low, Foliage Low, Volumetrics Off, Post-Processing Low, and Ray-Traced GI Off. Use FSR 3 Balanced — FSR 3 Quality at 1080p renders internally at 720p, producing a blurry image that makes tracking enemies at distance difficult. Balanced at 1080p keeps visual clarity competitive while recovering a meaningful frame budget. The RX 7600 XT’s 16GB VRAM is genuinely advantageous here: keep Texture Quality at Medium rather than Low to avoid the streaming pop-in that plagues 8GB cards in ARC Raiders’ large zones. Enable AMD Anti-Lag for minimum input latency, and close background applications — Chrome tabs, Discord overlays, and recording software are meaningful CPU load on the Ryzen 5 7600 during ARC Raiders’ UE5 world streaming and physics workloads.

Mid-Range PCs — Ryzen 7 7700X / RTX 5070 Class

This is the ARC Raiders sweet spot for competitive play. RTX 5070 owners running DLSS CNN Quality at 1440p with Medium-to-High settings hit 90–120fps in standard extraction zones and maintain a 60fps+ floor during the most demanding multi-faction encounters. Keep Shadows at Low — even at this hardware tier the jump to Medium shadows costs 10–15fps without a meaningful visual return in combat. Texture High is correct: the RTX 5070’s 12GB VRAM handles it without overflow, and the difference versus Medium is clearly visible at 1440p in the game’s detailed environments. Volumetrics Low adds atmospheric depth without the performance cost of Medium. Disable Frame Generation — with a base framerate already above 90fps, the input latency addition from FG outweighs the displayed frame count boost in PvP gunfights. Enable NVIDIA Reflex for the best possible click-to-render latency at this tier.

High-End PCs — Ryzen 7 9800X3D / RTX 5080 Class

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D’s 3D V-Cache gives it the strongest gaming performance available in ARC Raiders’ heavily threaded world-streaming and physics workloads — 1% lows are noticeably more stable than equivalent Ryzen 7000 non-X3D processors during large open-zone encounters. At 1440p the RTX 5080 runs High settings with DLSS CNN Quality and targets 120–144fps comfortably, with room to enable Ray-Traced GI on Static and push Volumetrics to Medium. For 4K at 60fps, drop to DLSS CNN Balanced and keep Ray-Traced GI at Static — full dynamic RT at 4K is RTX 5090 territory on this title.

Ultra / 4K Builds — RTX 5090 Class

RTX 5090 owners are the only players who can enable Ray-Traced GI on Low — full dynamic real-time global illumination — at 4K while sustaining 60fps+. Use DLSS CNN Quality to bring the render load to a manageable level, then combine RT GI Low with High shadows and Medium volumetrics for ARC Raiders’ best possible visual presentation. Keep Texture Quality at High rather than Epic — the Epic preset causes slower texture streaming and pop-in in the game’s large open zones even with abundant VRAM, which has been consistently reported across multiple testing setups. Frame Generation is viable at this tier during PvE content and exploration where the latency trade-off is less critical than in active gunfights.

ARC Raiders on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S

ARC Raiders runs in a single unified mode on PS5 and Xbox Series X, targeting 60fps using dynamic resolution scaling. Embark did not implement separate Performance Mode and Quality Mode toggles — the game ships with one consistent experience across both consoles. The PS5 uses High Quality scalability settings with a dynamic resolution range of 720p to 1600p, upscaled to 4K output. Xbox Series X runs a comparable configuration with a dynamic resolution range of 1080p to 1270p before upscaling. PS5 Pro owners receive an upgraded Epic Quality scalability preset and a higher dynamic resolution ceiling of 720p to 2160p, confirmed by Embark on the official Discord prior to launch.

PS5 — Best Settings

The PS5 targets 60fps in ARC Raiders and holds that target consistently through standard extraction play, with occasional dips during the heaviest multi-faction ARC encounters. The two confirmed in-game settings worth adjusting immediately are Motion Blur and FOV. Motion Blur is enabled by default and directly impairs your ability to track targets during fast strafing and rotation — disable it first. The FOV slider is available on PS5 and setting it to 80 gives you the maximum peripheral awareness the game allows without any meaningful performance cost. If your TV or monitor supports VRR, enable it in the PS5 system settings under Screen and Video — it smooths out the frame dips that occur during intense encounters by allowing the display to sync to the dynamic resolution output rather than holding a fixed refresh, which makes the experience feel more consistently responsive than the raw framerate numbers would suggest.

Xbox Series X|S — Best Settings

Xbox Series X mirrors the PS5 approach with a single 60fps mode and dynamic resolution scaling to 4K. Apply the same in-game adjustments: Motion Blur Off and FOV to 80. One additional system-level change is worth making on Xbox: if your display supports 120Hz, enable it in Xbox Settings under General → TV & display options. ARC Raiders does not run at 120fps on Series X, but enabling 120Hz output allows VRR to operate across a wider framerate band, which makes the dynamic resolution scaling perceptibly smoother during intensive encounters. Enable VRR in the same menu if your TV supports it. Xbox Series S runs the game at a reduced resolution floor, and ray tracing features available on Series X are absent on Series S.

Final Recommendations — ARC Raiders Best Settings Verdict

ARC Raiders best settings on every platform follow the same core principle: frame rate and input clarity come before visual effects, and the default presets will not make that trade for you. On PC, Foliage Low and Shadows Low are the two most important ARC Raiders settings changes at every hardware tier — the fps gains are significant, and the foliage setting currently carries a competitive visibility advantage that the default Medium preset actively works against. Always use DLSS CNN rather than DLSS Transformer in this game; the Transformer model has confirmed visual artifacts with ARC Raiders’ volumetric and ambient occlusion rendering. FSR 3 Quality serves AMD GPU owners well, best paired with Post-Processing Low to eliminate the AO noise amplification. Disable V-Sync and Frame Generation for any PvP content, and enable NVIDIA Reflex or AMD Anti-Lag at every hardware level — latency reduction is always relevant in an extraction shooter. On PS5 and Xbox Series X, the two settings that will immediately improve your game are disabling Motion Blur and widening your FOV to 80 — both take under a minute to change and deliver a meaningfully sharper competitive experience from the very first raid.

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